The 2018 Marketing Technology Landscape
Each year, in what can only be called a labor of love, Scott Brinker releases the Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. Last time we shared it, there were only about 1000 charted solutions….this year? A whopping 6,829 marketing technology (aka martech) solutions from 6,242 unique marketing tech vendors!
I know – it’s SO MINISCULE. Feel free to zoom in here. Brinker also has higher resolutions available for download in his post.
It can be nice to take a step back from the daily tasks of marketing and look at the latest developments in the industry. While it’s near impossible to offer a fully comprehensive overview of what’s available in the ever-changing world of digital marketing, this gets pretty darn close and provides great insight into marketing technology structure, relationships, and trends. With the number of martech companies represented increasing 27% in only a year, it’s no wonder you (and I) have trouble keeping up!
Here’s the rundown on a few noteworthy things from Brinker and his collaborators’s updated supergraphic:
- Continual growth: Marketing consolidation is not happening a whole lot. Sure, some companies get acquired, go out of business, or change their names, but the shear volume of companies entering the market is overwhelming. In 2017, a record 14 billion plus dollars was invested in the martech landscape. That will take a little while to trickle down so we’ll likely see some interesting advances in the next twelve months or so, based on those venture capital and private equity investments.
- ‘Salestech’ is huge: This year. the category with the greatest number of vendors was Sales Automation, Enablement & Intelligence. To be successful, marketing and sales departments must work together so it makes sense to keep it on the martech landscape overview.
- Rise of bots and live chat: Text-based and voice-based chatbots are in a rapid state of innovation (and show no signs of slowing down) and Brinker addresses that by including them in their own category. Brinker also removed the category of ‘predictive analytics,’ not because that doesn’t exist anymore but because machine learning and predictive capabilities are in hundreds of marketing products now. Same thing goes with artificial intelligence (AI) – it’s in so many products in a multitude of categories that it doesn’t make sense to classify them separately. Since predictive analytics solutions are so prevalent now, it’s more intuitive to classify by capability that they enhance, e.g. web analytics.
- GDRP’s influence: A new category was added to the Data column for Compliance and Privacy and you can thank the GDPR for that. While it’s been frustrating and disruptive for many, it paves the way for better data quality and more consumer empowerment.
- Reliance on microservices and APIs: According to Brinker’s post, “The average enterprise today now uses over 1,000 cloud services across every department: marketing, sales, customer service, finance, IT, HR, etc.”
I particularly like the idea that we’re entering “into a post-platform era in martech.” Rather than searching for or creating one platform that does everything (a seemingly impossible task), martech is now exploring how to dynamically integrate many tools.
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What are your favorite marketing tools? Are there any you really want to try out in 2019?
